A.M. Vitals: Roche Gearing Up for Generic Battle

By Katherine Hobson

Roche Gets Ready: Swiss drug maker Roche’s strategy for dealing with future generic competition for its biotech drugs consists of developing improved versions of its current treatments, coming up with new ones and lobbying regulators to set high standards for follow-on biologics and biosimilars, the WSJ reports. For example, the company is working on new iterations of Herceptin and MabThera (marketed as Rituxan in the U.S.), which come off patent in Europe in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

What Stinks?: Musty odors are all the rage again for drug makers. J&J recently recalled 127,000 bottles of 8-Hour Tylenol because of the smell, and on Friday Pfizer widened its own recall of Lipitor for the same reason, the WSJ reports. The company says the bottles that seem to be the source of the odor were made by a third-party manufacturer.

Plague’s Family Tree: Medical geneticists say that the plague outbreaks that decimated Europe’s population originated in China, the New York Times reports. Data on the origins of the three waves of the plague, including the so-called Black Death that began in the 1300s, appear online in Nature Genetics.